RIM introduces BlackBerry Bold 9900 to SA

Research In Motion (RIM) South Africa today (15 September 2011) officially introduced the new BlackBerry Bold 9900 smartphone to the South African market at an event held in Broadacres, Johannesburg.

This is one of the smartphone manufacturer’s first releases since its stock value fell sharply in July. Industry analysts have suggested this may have been due to a lack of confidence in the BlackBerry brand owing to out-dated handset technology and a somewhat sluggish operating system.

Nonetheless, RIM has responded with the launch of the 9900, which boasts a 2.8-inch VGA (640×480) capacitive touch display in conjunction with the requisite BlackBerry QWERTY keyboard, a 1.2GHz processor, 768MB RAM, 8GB internal memory and SD support for up to 32GB.

Additionally, the Bold 9900 also incorporates a 5 Megapixel camera and is equipped to shoot video in 720p high definition format.

What is particularly significant about the 9900’s release is that it is the first local BlackBerry device to ship with the manufacturer’s updated BlackBerry OS 7

This, among other things, delivers a new interface to the handset while improving browsing speed through the implementation of a WebKit based engine.

According to RIM, BlackBerry OS 7 is 40% faster at browsing the web than BlackBerry OS 6 based handsets and 100% faster than those which feature BlackBerry OS 5.

Supplementary advancements to the BlackBerry OS 7 browser include optimised zooming and panning and improved support for HTML 5.

The BlackBerry Bold 9900 is now available nationally at a recommended retail price of R7,694 on prepaid.

Related article: BlackBerry Bold Touch 9900 review